Steven Spielberg Quotes

Am I allowed to say I really wanted this? This is fantastic.

Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison. He put the world at our fingertips.

My first reaction every time I delve into an episode of history that I don't know very much about is... my first reaction is anger that my teachers never taught me about it.

My problem is that my imagination won't turn off. I wake up so excited I can't eat breakfast. I've never run out of energy. It's not like OPEC oil; I don't worry about a premium going on my energy. It's just always been there. I got it from my mom.

I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.

When I don't have a movie, I don't take a job just for the sake of working. I just sit it out until I find something I'm passionate about.

If movies generically don't work, you immediately start to pick apart what ingredients contributed to that. If any movie is working, hopefully how it was made will be the least of your concern. You'll only want to have a god time.

Desperate times require desperate measures. What Lincoln and the Lobbyist for the Amendment and the Manager of the Amendment and himself, what they did to get this passed was not illegal. It was murky, but what they did was noble and grand. How they went about it was somewhat murky. Nothing they did was really illegal.

I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero. The minute anybody presumes that they are heroes, they get their boots taken away from them and buried in the sand.

History is so fleeting and we are so busy consuming media and the contemporary culture, voraciously gobbling it up, that we have no room to look back ever, and our young people have a tough time looking back.

I think in terms of chapters. Every time I finish a movie, it's a chapter. When one of my kids graduates from school, that's a chapter.

My dad took me to my first movie.

I quit college so fast I didn't even clean out my locker.

I guess my first digital movie was 'Tintin' because 'Tintin' has no film step. There is no intermediate film step. It's 100% digital animation, but as far as a live-action film, I'm still planning to shoot everything on film.

I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don't think that's the right way of making a decision about whether you're going to back a film or not.

It all starts with the script: it's not worth taking myself away from my family if I don't have something I'm really passionate about.

I can't describe it, what I'm feeling and what I'm thinking. This means something. This is important.

I made 'Empire of the Sun' in Shanghai in the 1980s and want to come back one day to make a movie in China.

I love my kids as individuals, not as a herd, and I do have a herd of children: I have seven kids.

The age doesn't really matter to me as it seems to matter to other people. A lot of people think that youth or age is the total sum of your knowledge about anything, and it's absolutely untrue. I think I might have even known more five years ago than I do now.

Even though I get older, what I do never gets old, and that's what I think keeps me hungry.

I've been shooting movies and television shows for now 47 years and I've worked with the best of them and [Kirk Douglas] is the only movie star I ever met.

I was fifteen, or sixteen. I was in high school. I was spending a summer in California with my second cousins. And I wanted to be a director really bad. I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.

When you listen, you learn, You absorb like a sponge - and your life becomes so much better than when you are just trying to be listened to all the time.

I've always been interested in how we survive and how resourceful we are as Americans.

All good ideas start out as bad ideas, that's why it takes so long.

I thought film was more important than life itself for many years. But I was naive to the world until my first child was born in 1985.

When I felt like an outsider, movies made me feel inside my own skill set.

I really trust the authenticity of real people and my job is to get them to be themselves in front of the camera. Often what happens is, you'll get a newcomer in front of the camera and they'll freeze up or they imitate actors or other performances that they've admired and so they stop becoming themselves. And so my job as the director is just to always return them to what I first saw in them, which was simply an uncensored human being.

And I may often question choices I make as a producer. But I've never questioned the choices I make as a director.

I have a choice - I can either watch all the dailies, or I can follow the social media. I can't do both.

I believe in 3D for certain kinds of films. I certainly believe in using 3D for all things in animation because animation has such clarity and so much depth of focus. It worked great with 'Avatar' because 70 percent of that film is animated.

Akira Kurosawa is the pictorial William Shakespeare of our time.

The love we do not show here on Earth is the only thing that hurts us in the after-life.

I feel there is no substitute for going out to the movies. There is nothing like it.

I just think that the qualities of leadership are unknown even to the leader until he's tested and given a challenge.

Bloated budgets are ruining Hollywood - these pictures are squeezing all the other types of movies out of Hollywood. It's disastrous.

A lot of the films I've made probably could have worked just as well 50 years ago, and that's just because I have a lot of old-fashion values.

The Internet has been this miraculous conduit to the undeniable truth to the Holocaust.

When I don't have a story to tell, I'm a terror to live with.

I think every film I make that puts characters in jeopardy is me purging my own fears, sadly only to re-engage with them shortly after the release of the picture. I'll never make enough films to purge them all.

I simply adore 'The Simpsons.' I go to bed in a 'Simpsons' T-shirt.

I think every movie I've made after 'Indiana Jones,' I've tried to make every single movie as if it was made by a different director, because I'm very conscious of not wanting to impose a consistent style on subject matter that is not necessarily suited to that style. So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject.

There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating. It's bound to try a man's soul.

I've always been interested in UFOs.

Whatever affect any of my films have on audiences, I just kind of stop at the door. I make them and I just don't go outside after they're over.

Actors just need each other to act together.

When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.